Remembering Juris Jurjevics (1943–2018)

November 12

How does one remember, publicly, a dear friend? Only very, very approximately. Losses like this are irremediable. You really need the person him- or herself, in the flesh, alive and kicking. Our memories, however vivid, are poor cousins to the real thing.

Juris was a founding member of the Seven Stories advisory board, joining other luminaries like Athol Fugard and Kurt Vonnegut. We’ve even brought the esteemed members together a few times, not annually, but like certain blooming desert plants, once every decade or so when the temperature is just right. But none of the other members, I can say with assurance, deeply understood, as Juris did, what an undertaking it is to do what independent publishers do every day across the globe, providing shelter and encouragement for writers and the whole clackity-clack machine of cultural production. And in Juris’s caring hands, that understanding was always expressed with a wink and an indulgent smile, and, ironically, in few words.

I was trying to explain to my sixteen-year old son the magnitude of the loss we have in losing Juris, minutes after I’d heard, and what I ended up telling him was how Juris usually made it his business to come to you. And when you think about it, this tells you everything you need to know about Juris. He was burdened by crippling heart disease, and the devastating nervous system effects of Agent Orange poisoning from his tour of military service in Vietnam. Those antagonists notwithstanding, he would suggest meeting on Christopher Street, at Fika, or at my home, all of which required him to get on the subway and put his body through something that I’m guessing was akin to another person coming to you walking on their hands.

When Juris and Jeannie decided to get married close to two decades ago, he called me a few days before and asked if I might be able to cancel my lunch plans so I could be his best man. And when my first company, and my life, was going over a cliff almost a quarter-century ago, Juris decided he would meet me once a week after work for a civilized drink at a bar with outdoor tables overlooking Union Square with all the tall trees in the park applauding in their stately way, an oasis Juris conjured up for me during those difficult months. This is a friend, someone who’s seen things, and who knows how to protect and cherish all the things in life worth protecting and cherishing, you among them.

There are many, many, many people with similar stories they could share about this man, large in his loves, large in his joy.

I am glad for him, glad that he made his mark as an independent publisher, in both senses of the word, both in corporate spheres and as an indie co-founder of the terrific house Soho Press, which he co-founded with Laura Hruska, and which has now successfully managed the difficult leap into the second generation of leadership under Laura’s daughter Bronwen. I’m glad also that he was able gracefully to transition from publisher to author, with two successful smart thrillers, and a third one we hope still to come. Juris lives, and many are we whose lives are better off because of him. Rest in peace, Dan

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Population and Scarcity

Anxiety about scarcity runs deep in the American psyche. Some of the reasons are understandable. Growing up during the Great Depression of the 1930s, my parents’ generation experienced what happened when the bottom fell out of the economy, and worried that it could happen again. Many poor Americans live with real scarcity, not sure where the next meal is going to come from. In 2014, one in seven American households suffered from food insecurity at some point during the year, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, the boom-and-bust cycle of financial markets, cuts in government spending on safety nets, the high price of health insurance, and the rising cost of living keep all but the richest Americans on edge.

There are also more irrational fears of Scarcity with a capital “S.” Americans often read periodic shortages of food, water, or energy as harbingers of a population and environment apocalypse that will make our bellies ache, mouths go dry, and houses go dark. And even if we stockpile food, water, and fuel against this specter, we worry that desperate hordes of poor people will come to loot them.

Such fears of scarcity derive in large part from the America syndrome, especially our fractured relationship with nature. Puritan guilt at our profligacy elicits dread of the revenge that an angry Nature, like Jonathan Edwards’s angry God, will make us suffer for our sins. Or, as Paul Ehrlich puts it, “It’s the top of the ninth inning and humanity has been hitting nature hard, but you’ve always got to remember that nature bats last.” Ehrlich makes a straight line to Malthus, thinking our population numbers ultimately force nature to take its final revenge.

Overlaid with this trepidation is the peculiarly American geographical anxiety about shrinking space—too many people, too little room—that also predisposes us to Malthusian ideas. I began writing this chapter having just returned from a cross-country trip from California to Massachusetts. Anyone who has made that journey knows how long the country stretches from coast to coast, and that along the route there are vast empty spaces where you have to plan where to stop for gas since the next station will be many miles away. I used to think it was sort of crazy, given all those empty miles, that Americans worry so much about population pressure, much more in fact than Europeans who live in more densely populated lands. Gradually, I have come to understand that how we occupied this great and beautiful continent, and what we did and didn’t learn from that history, accounts for much of our claustrophobia. It’s less about craziness than about enduring national myths.

When I was a child, I was taught that when the Europeans arrived in North America, they found a wilderness. While there were a few Native Americans lurking around, they were savages whose presence didn’t tame the landscape. Recent historical research has blown apart this wilderness myth. In his book 1491, author Charles Mann draws on this scholarship to paint a very different picture of what the country looked like before the Europeans showed up. In the 16th century, New England alone may have been home to 100,000 or more Native Americans. Much earlier than that, from 950–1250, the Native American town of Cahokia, on the banks of the Mississippi, not far from what is now St. Louis, was a thriving population center. It grew to a size of at least 15,000 people, similar to the size of London at that time.

Across the continent, Native Americans managed fields and forests to sustain their livelihoods. They used fire to turn the Great Plains and Midwest prairies into “prodigious game farms” for bison and other large animals; in the eastern forests, they cut the underbrush to facilitate hunting, cleared land for farming, and managed tree species. “Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau,” Mann writes, “the great eastern forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak.” Native Americans enjoyed longer life expectancies, and quite possibly a higher quality of life, than most Europeans. But the new diseases, like smallpox, that arrived with the Europeans depopulated the continent. Early settlers found the New England woodlands littered with human bones and skulls.

On their divine errand into this wilderness, the Pilgrims saw this depopulation as a gift from God. Later generations of Americans simply forgot that the land had been populated in the first place. The wilderness became a romantic, sublime, quasi-religious force, and its loss a source of profound nostalgia. “For many Americans,” writes historian William Cronon, “wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth.”

The “wilderness ethic” became a cornerstone of American environmentalism, locating Nature in places without people, rather than in the places where people live. John Muir, iconic father of the wilderness movement and first president of the Sierra Club, saw no place for Native Americans in the “pure wildness” of Yosemite. Those that lived there were “most ugly, and some of them altogether hideous,” he wrote, and “they seemed to have no right place in the landscape.” The government agreed, and they were expelled to make way for the national park. Ironically, the Native Americans had carefully managed that landscape through controlled burns, giving Yosemite Valley the park-like appearance that so enchanted Muir. Once they were gone, the ecosystem declined. Muir’s prejudices didn’t allow him to see the people for the trees.

In 1893, the US Census Bureau officially announced there was no more unsettled land in the country. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner lamented “the closing of a great historic moment,” and declared that American history was largely about the colonization of the Great West: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuing recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” The frontier transformed the pioneers from Europeans into rugged Americans. “The wilderness masters the colonist,” Turner wrote.

There is a conundrum here. For if both the wilderness and the frontier are fundamental to American identity, what happens if advancing the latter means destroying the former? And when we reach the limits of both—a vanished wilderness, a closed frontier—what then? Imperial adventures overseas, or into outer space, may extend the frontier, but our continental dream is dashed. In its place arise the nightmares of Scarcity. The land can no longer hold all of us, at least not in the manner to which we believe we are entitled.

Combined with the fear of shrinking space come periodic racial panics about overcrowding, especially in urban areas where black and immigrant communities are viewed as an ominous threat. In the 1960s and ’70s, population control advocates purposefully placed articles and images about overcrowding in popular media to build support for their cause. “How many people do you want in your country?” one of Hugh Moore’s ads asked, painting a picture of cities “packed with youngsters—thousands of them idle, victims of discontent and drug addiction . . . You go out after dark at your peril. Birth Control is an answer.” In fact, framing the population issue in terms of overcrowding was an important factor in building a public consensus for population control interventions in the US and overseas. It still is. To warn Americans about the perils of overpopulation, the recent coffee table book Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot, produced by the Foundation for Deep Ecology and the Population Media Center, features photographs of dark-skinned crowds struggling to get on urban transport or squashed together in a “human tide” on a beach. These representations of the “collected weight of a bloated humanity” almost never include any white people. No photographs of businessmen at rush hour in Manhattan’s Grand Central Station.

Our economic system breeds further scarcity fears. Modern textbooks define economics as being about the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends. Homo economicus rationally pursues his self-interest, with little room for other values like altruism, sharing, and caring, and this is exalted as rational behavior. Capitalism enshrines greed as the holy grail. In his book Scarcity and Modernity, political scientist Nicholas Xenos tells the story of how capitalism came to reframe our view of human nature so that to be human is to have unlimited wants and desires, defined in relation to the next guy’s, that outstrip our actual needs. We don’t just need an adequate roof over our heads, but a bigger and bigger house in a never-ending quest to keep up with the Joneses.

These insatiable appetites that are the engine of American consumerism are bred into us by Madison Avenue and the purveyors of credit. As a result, most Americans are constantly pushing against another frontier, the bottom line of their bank accounts. The anxiety this creates has intensified in recent years due to deepening wealth inequality and the instability and corruption of a financial system that runs on risk and speculation. Globally, the bottom 50 percent of adults on the wealth scale now own less than 1 percent of the world’s total wealth, while the richest 10 percent own almost 90 percent of total wealth. The top 1 percent alone owns 50 percent. The US is no stranger to this pattern. The top 0.1 percent—approximately 160,000 families—owns almost a quarter of the nation’s wealth, a figure that is almost as high as before the 1929 stock market crash. With so much wealth in so few hands, the specter of the 2008 global financial crisis still fresh in many people’s minds, and a volatile labor market where workers are easily expendable, it’s hard for most Americans to feel economically secure. Scarcity looms, if not today, then certainly tomorrow.

In an article written 20 years ago, but equally applicable to today, historian Andrew Ross contends that many Americans have come to conflate such economic scarcities with natural ones. We live in an era, he argues, when American capitalism is pushing natural limits in terms of guzzling resources, generating waste, and degrading the environment. At the same time, in thrall to the neoliberal ideology of competitive individualism and free markets, the government has imposed cuts on health, education, and social services, enforcing an austerity regime that hits the working and middle classes the hardest. While the root causes of both kinds of scarcity—natural and economic—lie in particular features of our economy and political system, we are told instead that they result from Malthusian population pressures: because there are too many of us, there’s not enough money or natural resources to go around. This potent “scarcity cocktail” dulls the critical senses, preventing us from seeing what’s really going on.

Duels and Dualisms

Challenging the hold of Scarcity on the American imagination is thus no easy task. Doing so is complicated by the either/or dualism that is part of the America syndrome and that pervades so much of our thinking. In the name of balance, the media typically frame debates in terms of two competing views. When it comes to scarcity, the battle is between doomsday predictors on one side and cornucopian free marketeers on the other. Epitomizing this dualism is the bet made in 1980 between biologist Paul Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon on what would happen over the next decade to the prices of five scarce metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten). Ehrlich bet their prices would go up, while Simon wagered they would go down. Simon won.

The bet, which featured as a cover story in the New York Times magazine, was about much more than the price of metals. Simon maintained that shortages of resources simply spur the development of new techniques to find them, so that, in the end, we’re better off than if the temporary shortage had never occurred. Moreover, population growth is a good thing since people are the “ultimate resource,” provided they live in a free market economy where they can come up with the new ideas to make the system work. Simon’s positive view of human potential didn’t extend to government, however. In his libertarian view, government regulation was a break on progress. If capitalism creates some environmental damages along the way, then capitalism will also find the means to fix them. We don’t need the likes of the Clean Air Act and the EPA.

Simon’s techno-hubris and disdain for environmental protection made Ehrlich appear to be the responsible conservationist. Simon and Ehrlich’s contrasting positions came to demarcate differences between the Democratic and Republican parties on environmental issues and to deeply influence perceptions of population in the wider culture. This duality has made it difficult to critique Malthusianism without being cast as an enemy of the environment. If you disagree with Ehrlich, you must be in Simon’s camp. The notion that one could be in favor of environmental protection and not espouse population control is hard for people to fathom.

Cast as a duel between two alpha male experts, the competition between Ehrlich and Simon shut out women’s voices and turned reproduction into a political football tossed by men. While Ehrlich’s arguments were harnessed to support population control, Simon’s were used to encourage pro-natalist policies: the more babies women have, the better. Simon himself wasn’t against family planning, but the anti-abortion movement seized upon his arguments. At the International Conference on Population held in Mexico City in 1984, the Reagan administration announced that population wasn’t a problem. In what is now known as the global gag rule, it then proceeded to deny US government funds to any private family planning organization overseas that included abortion as an option or even just counseled women about it, marking the beginning of a full-scale attack on contraception and abortion access. The result was yet another dualism—this time between population control on the one hand and the anti-abortion movement on the other. In both scenarios, women lack agency. Instead, they are to be acted upon in the service of either preventing scarcity or guaranteeing abundance. Either way, they lose the right to chart their own reproductive destinies.

The War on Mothers and Others

Since its inception, Malthusianism has drawn on powerful stereotypes. While Malthus reduced his own parishioners to abstract numbers, his imagination roamed further when it came to the impoverished people of distant lands. In his famous essay, he embellished the dismal arithmetic of scarcity with over-heated colonialist narratives about the barbaric practices of inferior races (as well as less-than-flattering views of women almost everywhere). In rereading Malthus, scholar Carole McCann found this passage about the mating practices of “races of savages”:

He steals upon her in the absence of her protectors, and having first stupefied her with the blows of a club, or wooden sword, on the head, back, every one of which is followed by a stream of blood, he drags her through the woods by one arm, regardless of the stones and broken pieces of trees that may lie in his route, and anxious only to convey his prize in safety to his own party, where a most brutal scene occurs.

While the nations of northern Europe had some chance of reducing population pressure by means of moral restraint, Malthus viewed violence as endemic to the lesser cultures. He naturalized not only poverty, but violence, linking the latter explicitly to ethnicity and race.

Fear of the dark and menacing Other has passed down through successive generations in the “Church of Malthus,” along with loathing of the poor and the mothers who breed them. While numbers provide the arithmetic of population apocalypse, it is these more emotional undercurrents that turn believers into crusaders. In a classic inversion of victim and perpetrator, population crusaders justify violence against the poor by convincing themselves that the poor, especially poor men, are naturally violent. Malthusian violence against the poor takes three main forms: structural, reproductive, and nativist.

Structural violence refers to the violence of routine inequalities, embedded in the institutions and social arrangements that govern people’s lives. The exorbitant infant and child mortality rates we witnessed in Bangladesh in the 1970s were an example of structural violence: no single individual pulled the trigger, but lack of access to health care, clean water, and food condemned many children to an early death. By masking the power relationships that determine who has the right to live and who doesn’t, Malthusian ideology feeds into this structural violence. Politically, it often acts as a brake on reforms that could make things better. When the Bangladesh government devoted over one-third of the country’s health budget to curbing birth rates in the 1980s, this diverted resources from primary health care and the prevention and treatment of common diseases.

A century earlier, British colonial authorities in India allowed a severe drought to turn into the massive famine of 1876–1878, in which between five and eight million people perished, by shipping existing food stocks to Britain, failing to curtail speculation and hoarding, and not mounting relief efforts in the countryside. Afterward, British finance minister Sir Evelyn Baring told Parliament, “Every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.” Such views also influenced the British non-response to the Irish potato famine of 1846–1849, during which food was exported to England while the Irish peasants starved.

Reproductive violence directly targets sexuality, fertility, and child-bearing. One of the most dramatic forms is forced sterilization. This, too, has a long history. In the US in the early 20th century, eugenics, the science (or pseudo-science) of improving human heredity, was widely preached and often practiced. Proponents of racial hygiene called for improvement of the white race not only through controls on immigration and anti-miscegenation laws, but also through compulsory sterilization of prisoners, the mentally disabled, and poor women deemed to be a burden on the state by having too many children. Eugenics began as a private venture, funded by the likes of Andrew Carnegie and the wealthy Harriman and Kellogg families, but by 1932, 30 states had mandatory sterilization laws. Between the turn of the century and the end of World War II, some 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized. When Nazi Germany adopted eugenic laws, they were based in part on the Model Eugenic Sterilization Law developed by the US Eugenics Record Office.

Although the Nazi holocaust gave eugenics a bad name, 27 US states kept eugenic laws on the books into the 1970s, and Americans continued to be sterilized against their will. Black, Native American, and Latina women were the main targets. In the early 1970s, hundreds of Mexican-origin women were sterilized without their knowledge or consent at the University of Southern California–Los Angeles County Medical Center. In 1976 the US General Accounting Office revealed that the federally-funded Indian Health Services had sterilized 3000 Native American women over a four-year period without informed consent.

Concerns about population “quality” and “quantity” have often mingled. A number of the pioneers of population control, including Clarence Gamble (of the Procter and Gamble fortune), biologist Garrett Hardin, and Frederick Osborn of the Population Council, had strong ties to eugenics, as did Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who forsook her earlier radical feminist roots to forge an unsavory political alliance with the eugenics movement. Hardin, famous for his essay “Tragedy of the Commons” and his advocacy of lifeboat ethics—don’t let the poor onto the proverbial lifeboat if they’ll swamp and sink it—never gave up his eugenic ties, accepting money in the 1990s from the Pioneer Fund, the major funder of eugenics research in the US.

Like eugenics, population control at first was privately funded by wealthy individuals like Gamble and Dixie Cup magnate Hugh Moore, as well as private foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller. By the 1960s, however, it had become a major component of America’s Cold War foreign policy. In an important about-face, instead of reasoning that economic development would bring down birth rates, influential demographers began to reverse this logic and identify rapid population growth in poor countries as a serious impediment to development. Reducing birth rates, they argued, was a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, successful modernization. And if poor countries didn’t develop quickly, they would be susceptive to Communist takeover. By 1967, the US government had become the largest funder of population control programs in the world.

In the 1970s, the US government pushed sterilization over temporary contraceptive methods in many of the programs it supported. Coercion became a matter of course. As in the case of eugenics, victims of this social engineering were overwhelmingly poor, non-white mothers. In subsequent years, the technology shifted to long-acting forms of contraception, such as the IUD, hormonal implants, and injectables. While these methods were an improvement over forced sterilization, they were often delivered in coercive environments that denied women contraceptive choice and took dangerous risks with their health.

The reproductive violence of population control sparked an international women’s health movement against it. As a member of this movement, I advocated (and still advocate) voluntary family planning as part of comprehensive health services, as opposed to family planning as a weapon of population control. In 1994, at the UN international population conference in Cairo, the women’s health movement succeeded in shifting policy away from coercion and toward respect for reproductive rights, but reforms proved easier on paper than in practice. Only a few years later, the Fujimori dictatorship in Peru launched a brutal campaign that sterilized some 300,000 indigenous women. When the scandal broke, the US government pleaded ignorance, though it supported Fujimori financially and approved of his population control targets.

The Campaign to Stop Torture in Health Care, an initiative of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations in New York, defined forced sterilization as a form of medical torture. If we don’t condone torture in other arenas, why should it be acceptable in this most intimate realm of women’s bodies and lives? Today, five US states—California, Oregon, Virginia, and North and South Carolina—have issued public apologies to the victims of eugenic sterilization. No such apology has been forthcoming from the US federal government for its role in forced sterilization overseas.

Panic over saving the planet from overpopulation, meanwhile, encourages people to turn a blind, or half-open, eye to coercion: Well, we had to get those birth rates down somehow. While many Americans find the Chinese practice of forced abortions and sterilizations distasteful, there has been a willingness to tolerate them because, after all, aren’t there already too many Chinese gobbling up the world’s resources? Or if only it could be done a little more humanely, wouldn’t the one-child policy be a great model for the rest of the world?

Such attitudes were unfortunately bolstered by the failure of major international family planning organizations to speak out against the Chinese policy. In fact, both the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) actively aided China in implementing it. In 1983, during the initial wave of heavy coercion, the UN bestowed its first Population Award to China’s family planning minister. (He shared the award with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who, along with her son Sanjay, was responsible for forcibly sterilizing over six million men during the Emergency Rule she imposed in 1975–76.) Only now is there belated recognition that the one-child policy ranks among the world’s most serious human rights violations of the past 35 years.363

Nativist forms of Malthusian violence explicitly target foreigners—and their babies—as national enemies. During the Cold War, the poor in developing countries were regarded as potential Communists. Today, they are portrayed as potential terrorists or dangerous migrants, or both rolled up into one. National security pundits warn about new kinds of population bombs, often with an Islamic cast. Too many Palestinian babies, too few Israeli ones, or “youth bulges” of angry, urbanized Muslim young men who are easy recruits for political extremism. In the face of these challenges, aging white Western populations just can’t keep up.

In Europe, declining fertility and aging populations are stoking fears of a “demographic winter,” in which the barren white population is overwhelmed by dark-skinned immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. In the words of author Kathryn Joyce, demographic winter is “a more austere brand of apocalypse than doomsdayers normally trade in, evoking not a nuclear inferno but a quiet and cold blanket of snow in which . . . Western civilization is laying itself down to die.” In the US, the prospect that whites may become a minority by 2050 sparks similar anxieties.

The scapegoating of immigrants for environmental degradation gives nativism an environmental twist. I first encountered this phenomenon, which I’ve called the greening of hate, when I was invited to debate a woman named Virginia Abernethy at an environmental law conference in Oregon in 1994. Abernethy, a professor at Vanderbilt University, was representing an organization called the Carrying Capacity Network. The topic of our debate was supposed to be women and population stabilization, but I soon realized I wasn’t debating a fellow environmentalist or family planning advocate, but instead an anti-immigrant zealot for whom “population control” and “carrying capacity” meant circling our wagons and closing our borders. I later learned that Abernethy worked with the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. In 2011, she joined the neofascist American Third Position Party, now renamed the American Freedom Party, the largest racist political party now operating in the US.

In the person of Abernethy I encountered a well-funded nativist network, founded by Michigan ophthalmologist and neo-eugenicist John Tanton, that cloaks itself in green language to lure liberal environmentalists into its conservative fold. Its main contention is that immigration, by spurring US population growth, drives environmental degradation. When they come to the US, the argument goes, immigrants cause everything from traffic congestion to deforestation to accelerated greenhouse gas emissions. This environmental burden compounds the supposed economic burden they place on taxpayers, schools, hospitals, and other public services. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, this nativist movement sought to take over the Sierra Club by becoming members en masse in order to get the Club to take a stand against immigration and put nativists on the board. Fortunately, they were beaten back, but they have hardly faded away. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, which has helped to orchestrate the greening of hate, took an active role in drafting Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration law. New front groups, with names like Progressives for Immigration Reform, continue to woo environmentalists with Malthusian arguments.

The structural, reproductive, and nativist violence condoned and espoused by the “Church of Malthus” makes apocalyptic fear of overpopulation more than an eccentric preoccupation, and more than a diversion from efforts to understand and address the real causes of poverty, environmental degradation, and war. The violence moves beyond sins of omission to the more dangerous terrain of actively committed transgressions against human dignity and lives. This makes it ethically imperative to confront and challenge its core beliefs. What is more, freeing ourselves from population fundamentalism allows us to imagine, and start to create, a more peaceful, equitable, and sustainable future.

Keeping Time

In addition to images of ticking time bombs depicting overpopulation, there are actual clocks that register each new birth as if it were a potential disaster. One such clock is posted on a medical building at a busy intersection in New Delhi. On the website of the Population Media Center in the US, a similar clock tells how many human beings were added to the planet during your visit. The countdown to doom is measured one birth at a time. Humanity is heading backwards, not forwards.

Sometimes the population time keepers raise the rhetoric to fever pitch. As the year 2000 millennium approached, Population Connection, the group formerly called ZPG, launched a campaign that tried to link the birth of the world’s six billionth child to the coming Y2K global computer crash, a disaster that never materialized despite all the hype. In his 2013 book Countdown, author Alan Weisman warns that the population crisis could lead humanity to extinction. “Either we decide to manage our own numbers, to avoid a collision of every line on civilization’s graph,” he writes, “or nature will do it for us, in the form of famines, thirst, climate chaos, crashing ecosystems, opportunistic disease, and wars over dwindling resources that finally cut us down to size.” He believes our numbers have reached a point “where we’ve essentially redefined the concept of original sin.”

How do we rid ourselves of the ticking time bombs, the countdown clocks, the dismal models, and the dystopic dread that the Reverend Malthus set in motion two centuries ago? With birth rates dropping and family size shrinking around the world, his church’s time has passed, but the bells in the belfry are still ringing loudly. Their latest clamor concerns climate change.

Some American population and environment groups now argue that reducing population growth in developing countries is the key to mitigating climate change. The Sierra Club urges people to “fight climate change with family planning.” A private American philanthropist even financed a climate scientist to come up with a model that would show the purported linkage between the two. Yet industrialized countries, with 20 percent of the world’s population, are responsible for 80 percent of the carbon dioxide that has accumulated in the atmosphere. In 2010, the US emitted 17.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person, compared to 6.2 in China, 0.4 in Bangladesh, and 0.1 in Uganda.372 In the few countries in the world where population growth rates remain high, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, carbon emissions per person are the lowest on the planet.

Others, like Johns Hopkins philosopher Travis Rieder, are grabbing media attention by arguing that the looming climate catastrophe means that we should socially engineer a reduction in birth rates, not just in developing countries but at home, too. Curbing women’s fertility is supposedly easier than other measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. New parents in the US should be financially penalized for having children, Rieder maintains, while mothers in developing countries should have their birth control refills paid for. “Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them,” he told NPR. The absurd notion that babies cause climate change is a convenient way to obscure its structural causes, including the economic and political clout of the fossil fuel industry. It’s also yet another way to scapegoat women and children for global crisis.

Equally worrying is the way powerful interests in the international family planning field are turning the clock back toward population control, undoing a lot of the progress made at the 1994 international population conference in Cairo. They are reintroducing numerical targets, promoting long-acting contraceptives over other methods, and brushing aside critical health, safety, and human rights concerns.

Here in the US, population interests are targeting low-income young women and women of color with long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC for short), notably the IUD and hormonal implants. These methods are being touted as a technical fix for high rates of adolescent pregnancy and a solution to endemic poverty. While these methods should be part of the mix, the LARC strategy restricts poor women’s access to a wider range of contraceptives and opens the door to pressure and coercion. There are now reports of poor women on Medicaid not being able to get their IUDs removed unless they pay privately out of their own pocket. Concerned about such restrictions on reproductive choice, a number of women’s health groups, including Planned Parenthood, have signed onto a Statement of Principles to guide LARC distribution. The statement notes that “A one-size-fits-all focus on LARCs at the exclusion of a full discussion of other methods ignores the needs of each individual and the benefits that other contraceptive methods provide.”

Meanwhile, the anti-abortion movement very cleverly plays the moral high ground card whenever the international family planning establishment fails to speak out against coercion or sweeps contraceptive risks under the rug. This happened with China’s one-child policy, and it is happening now with Depo-Provera. In these instances, the anti-abortion movement falsely bills itself as the true defender of women. Instead, in working to deny women access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive health care—through defunding Planned Parenthood, for example—the movement undermines women’s health and human rights. The election of Donald Trump puts reproductive rights, including the legal right to abortion, granted in the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, in serious jeopardy. One of his earliest acts as president was to reinstate the global gag rule first imposed by Ronald Reagan.

Given the hyperbole on both sides, it’s important to remember that the population issue shouldn’t be defined by the two ideological poles of population control on the one hand and the anti-abortion movement on the other. You can promote reproductive rights and support access to birth control, including the right to safe, legal abortion, without supporting population control. You can be an environmentalist, too, without subscribing to Malthusian notions of Scarcity.

From the time of the Puritans onwards, the vision of Armageddon-style battles between good and evil, God and the Devil, has predisposed Americans to simple-minded dualisms and extremist ideologies. Malthusianism is one of them. The overpopulation fears it ignites help keep the larger American apocalyptic fire burning, and that fire in turn helps keeps Malthusianism alive. It’s a vicious cycle that we have to break.

Before leaving Malthus, I’d like to follow him back to Okewood, where he began his career. I think of him visiting the home of one of his poor parishioners. I imagine him as an inexperienced young man, standing in the doorway, peering in, aghast at the squalor and the emaciated children. Perhaps the woman of the house is breastfeeding a newborn baby. He’s invited in, but politely declines. He has seen enough, thank you. Incapable of making that basic human connection, he retreats to his study and the neat, comforting world of numbers. What if he had dared to stay, dared to ask a few sympathetic questions of both husband and wife, dared to get to the bottom of what caused their predicament?

There's a 2020 candidate for the presidency they call Bernie. You may have heard of him. He's an old-fashioned fellow, but his ideas—free college, medicare for all—are pretty newfangled.

He's in the news these days, now that the Democratic debates are in action, and he's drawing a lot of attention. In fact, when it comes to campaign donations from real live people, he's basically running the show. See the map above, or the link here. It represents which candidates have received the most individual donations, by United States county. Bernie is in the blue.

See also Ted Rall's graphic biography on Bernie, appropriately titled Bernie. It does a great job telling the whole story of how the Democrats came to be in the pockets of their corporate sponsors over the past fifty years—and how Bernie may just be the man to put an end to all that. Rall regularly blogs at his own website, with cartoons that include this month's "Damn Bernie Sanders Has Had It, Godamm It." Check it out, gosh darn it!

Back in 1996, Kurt Vonnegut wrote the foreword to a book by Paul Krassner with the beautiful title The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race. Paul’s own introduction to his book also had a memorable title. It was called “The President’s Penis.” At the launch for it at the National Arts Club that autumn, Kurt rose to his full height at the podium, leaning into it, and said with emotion to the large audience, “Paul Krassner is a national treasure. Indeed, he is one of our most important national treasures.”

There were titters in the audience. Vonnegut glared at them. They had assumed he was being comical in his remarks, since after all Paul Krassner was as irreverent a satirist as has ever carried a US passport. But he wasn’t kidding. And now he raged at the audience, assuring them he was as serious as he had ever been, and that if anyone didn’t agree they were free to leave. No one left. There was a long pause in which Vonnegut cooled off, and people recovered from the shock of seeing him genuinely angry and intimidating in defense of his friend.

Then he continued with his remarks, mostly talking about how enamored he was of a poster Paul had created and put on sale, at the start of the ’60s, consisting of the words “Fuck Communism” against a background of red, white, and blue. Kurt considered this to be, he said, “a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity…as Einstein’s e=mc2.” And at the end of his remarks, he invited Paul to the podium to continue the presentation.

Paul was co-founder with Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies and one of Abbie’s longest standing friends and collaborators. Paul founded and still edited, half a century and more later, the Realist, and authored many books, including three from Seven Stories, The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race, One Hand Jerking, and Impolite Interviews. He co-wrote Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, and probably considered Lenny his bff. Paul wasn’t simply funny, he was kind of the original funny bone of America.

In the last couple of weeks Paul was writing a foreword for me to a biography of Abbie Hoffman by Abbie’s brother Jack and me that Seven Stories is reissuing in the fall. He needed my help to get it done, but he was still funny and warm and smart in all our emails back and forth. I had no idea this was so close to the end. Without knowing anything about it, I felt enormously grateful to him for his gesture of support and the absolute graciousness with which he made it. I’m guessing it was the last piece he wrote. His last words to me, written eleven days ago, conveying his agreement about a sentence in the foreword I suggested he keep ambiguous, were “Mushy lives.”

Paul knew a lot of the same people we did, and was an enormous influence on many of them. And maybe “influence” is too obvious-sounding a word. He was a counter-comfort, comforting because you knew you could go as far as you possibly could to test the limits, no holds barred, and still be comfortably inside the larger net he cast without even thinking too hard about it.

An Unlikely Activist

You may not realize it, but you are participating in an unauthorized experiment—“the largest biological experiment ever,” in the words of Swedish neuro-oncologist Leif Salford. For the first time, many of us are holding high-powered microwave transmitters—in the form of cell phones—directly against our heads on a daily basis.

Cell phones generate electromagnetic fields (EMF), and emit electromagnetic radiation (EMR). They share this feature with all modern electronics that run on alternating current (AC) power (from the power grid and the outlets in your walls) or that utilize wireless communication. Different devices radiate different levels of EMF, with different characteristics.

What health effects do these exposures have?

Therein lies the experiment.

The many potential negative health effects from EMF exposure (including many cancers and Alzheimer’s disease) can take decades to develop. So we won’t know the results of this experiment for many years—possibly decades. But by then, it may be too late for billions of people.

Today, while we wait for the results, a debate rages about the potential dangers of EMF. The science of EMF, discussed in the next chapter, is not easily taught, and as a result, the debate over the health effects of EMF exposure can get quite complicated. To put it simply, the debate has two sides. On the one hand, there are those who urge the adoption of a precautionary approach to the public risk as we continue to investigate the health effects of EMF exposure. This group includes many scientists, myself included, who see many danger signs that call out strongly for precaution. On the other side are those who feel that we should wait for definitive proof of harm before taking any action. The most vocal of this group include representatives of industries who undoubtedly perceive threats to their profits and would prefer that we continue buying and using more and more connected electronic devices.

This industry effort has been phenomenally successful, with widespread adoption of many EMF-generating technologies throughout the world. But EMF has many other sources as well. Most notably, the entire power grid is an EMF-generation network that reaches almost every individual in America and 75% of the global population. Today, early in the 21st century, we find ourselves fully immersed in a soup of electromagnetic radiation on a nearly continuous basis.

What we know

The science to date about the bioeffects (biological and health outcomes) resulting from exposure to EM radiation is still in its early stages. We cannot yet predict that a specific type of EMF exposure (such as 20 minutes of cell phone use each day for 10 years) will lead to a specific health outcome (such as cancer). Nor are scientists able to define what constitutes a “safe” level of EMF exposure.

However, while science has not yet answered all of our questions, it has determined one fact very clearly—all electromagnetic radiation impacts living beings. As I will discuss throughout this book, science demonstrates a wide range of bioeffects linked to EMF exposure. For instance, numerous studies have found that EMF damages and causes mutations in DNA—the genetic material that defines us as individuals and collectively as a species. Mutations in DNA are believed to be the initiating steps in the development of cancers, and it is the association of cancers with exposure to EMF that has led to calls for revising safety standards. This type of DNA damage is seen at levels of EMF exposure equivalent to those resulting from typical cell phone use.

The damage to DNA caused by EMF exposure is believed to be one of the mechanisms by which EMF exposure leads to negative health effects. Multiple separate studies indicate significantly increased risk (up to two and three times normal risk) of developing certain types of brain tumors following EMF exposure from cell phones over a period of many years. One review that averaged the data across 16 studies found that the risk of developing a tumor on the same side of the head as the cell phone is used is elevated 240% for those who regularly use cell phones for 10 years or more. An Israeli study found that people who use cell phones at least 22 hours a month are 50% more likely to develop cancers of the salivary gland (and there has been a four-fold increase in the incidence of these types of tumors in Israel between 1970 and 2006).1 And individuals who lived within 400 meters of a cell phone transmission tower for 10 years or more were found to have a rate of cancer three times higher than those living at a greater distance.2 Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) designated EMF—including power frequencies and radio frequencies—as a possible cause of cancer.

While cancer is one of the primary classes of negative health effects studied by researchers, EMF exposure has been shown to increase risk for many other types of negative health outcomes. In fact, levels of EMF thousands of times lower than current safety standards have been shown to significantly increase risk for neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease) and male infertility associated with damaged sperm cells. In one study, those who lived within 50 meters of a high voltage power line were significantly more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease when compared to those living 600 meters or more away. The increased risk was 24% after one year, 50% after 5 years, and 100% after 10 years.3 Other research demonstrates that using a cell phone between two and four hours a day leads to 40% lower sperm counts than found in men who do not use cell phones, and the surviving sperm cells demonstrate lower levels of motility and viability.

EMF exposure (as with many environmental pollutants) not only affects people, but all of nature. In fact, negative effects have been demonstrated across a wide variety of plant and animal life. EMF, even at very low levels, can interrupt the ability of birds and bees to navigate. Numerous studies link this effect with the phenomena of avian tower fatalities (in which birds die from collisions with power line and communications towers). These same navigational effects have been linked to colony collapse disorder (CCD), which is devastating the global population of honey bees (in one study, placement of a single active cell phone in front of a hive led to the rapid and complete demise of the entire colony4). And a mystery illness affecting trees around Europe has been linked to WiFi radiation in the environment.

As I explain in the coming chapters, there is a lot of science—high-quality, peer-reviewed science—demonstrating these and other very troubling outcomes from exposure to electromagnetic radiation. These effects are seen at levels of EMF that, according to regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates cell phone EMF emissions in the United States, are completely safe.

An unlikely activist

I have worked at Columbia University since the 1960s, but I was not always focused on electromagnetic fields. My PhDs in physical chemistry from Columbia University and colloid science from the University of Cambridge provided me with a strong, interdisciplinary academic background in biology, chemistry, and physics. Much of my early career was spent investigating the properties of surfaces and very thin films, such as those found in a soap bubble, which then led me to explore the biological membranes that encase living cells.

I studied the biochemistry of infant respiratory distress syndrome (IRDS), which causes the lungs of newborns to collapse (also called hyaline membrane disease). Through this research, I found that the substance on the surface of healthy lungs could form a network that prevented collapse in healthy babies (the absence of which causes the problem for IRDS sufferers).

A food company subsequently hired me to study how the same surface support mechanism could be used to prevent the collapse of the air bubbles added to their ice cream. As ice cream is sold by volume and not by weight, this enabled the company to reduce the actual amount of ice cream sold in each package. (My children gave me a lot of grief about that job, but they enjoyed the ice cream samples I brought home.)

I also performed research exploring how electrical forces interact with the proteins and other components found in nerve and muscle membranes. In 1987, I was studying the effects of electric fields on membranes when I read a paper by Dr. Reba Goodman demonstrating some unusual effects of EMF on living cells. She had found that even relatively weak power fields from common sources (such as those found near power lines and electrical appliances) could alter the ability of living cells to make proteins. I had long understood the importance of electrical forces on the function of cells, but this paper indicated that magnetic forces (which are, as I will explain in the next chapter, a key aspect of electromagnetic fields) also had significant impact on living cells.

Like most of my colleagues, I did not think this was possible. By way of background, there are some types of EMF that everyone had long acknowledged are harmful to humans. For example, X-rays and ultraviolet radiation are both recognized carcinogens. But these are ionizing forms of radiation. Dr. Goodman, however, had shown that even non-ionizing radiation, which has much less energy than X-rays, was affecting a very basic property of cells—the ability to stimulate protein synthesis.

Because non-ionizing forms of EMF have so much less energy than ionizing radiation, it had long been believed that non-ionizing electromagnetic fields were harmless to humans and other biological systems. And while it was acknowledged that a high enough exposure to non-ionizing EMF could cause a rise in body temperature—and that this temperature increase could cause cell damage and lead to health problems—it was thought that low levels of non-ionizing EMF that did not cause this rise in temperature were benign.

In over 20 years of experience at some of the world’s top academic institutions, this is what I’d been taught and this is what I’d been teaching. In fact, my department at Columbia University (like every other comparable department at other universities around the world) taught an entire course in human physiology without even mentioning magnetic fields, except when they were used diagnostically to detect the effects of the electric currents in the heart or brain. Sure magnets and magnetic fields can affect pieces of metal and other magnets, but magnetic fields were assumed to be inert, or essentially powerless, when it came to human physiology.

As you can imagine, I found the research in Dr. Goodman’s paper intriguing. When it turned out that she was a colleague of mine at Columbia, with an office just around the block, I decided to follow up with her, face-to-face. It didn’t take me long to realize that her data and arguments were very convincing. So convincing, in fact, that I not only changed my opinion on the potential health effects of magnetism, but I also began a long collaboration with her that has been highly productive and personally rewarding.

During our years of research collaboration, Dr. Goodman and I published many of our results in respected scientific journals. Our research was focused on the cellular level—how EMF permeate the surfaces of cells and affect cells and DNA—and we demonstrated several observable, repeatable health effects from EMF on living cells. As with all findings published in such journals, our data and conclusions were peer reviewed. In other words, our findings were reviewed prior to publication to ensure that our techniques and conclusions, which were based on our measurements, were appropriate. Our results were subsequently confirmed by other scientists, working in other laboratories around the world, independent from our own.

A change in tone

Over the roughly 25 years Dr. Goodman and I have been studying the EMF issue, our work has been referenced by numerous scientists, activists, and experts in support of public health initiatives including the BioInitiative Report (discussed in chapter 11), which was cited by the European Parliament when it called for stronger EMF regulations. Of course, our work was criticized in some circles, as well. This was to be expected, and we welcomed it—discussion and criticism is how science advances. But in the late 1990s, the criticism assumed a different character, both angrier and more derisive than past critiques.

On one occasion, I presented our findings at a US Department of Energy annual review of research on EMF. As soon as I finished my talk, a well-known Ivy League professor said (without any substantiation) that the data I presented were “impossible.” He was followed by another respected academic, who stated (again without any substantiation) that I had most likely made some “dreadful error.” Not only were these men wrong, but they delivered their comments with an intense and obvious hostility.

I later discovered that both men were paid consultants of the power industry—one of the largest generators of EMF. To me, this explained the source of their strong and unsubstantiated assertions about our research. I was witnessing firsthand the impact of private, profit-driven industrial efforts to confuse and obfuscate the science of EMF bioeffects.

Not the first time

I knew that this was not the first time industry opposed scientific research that threatened their business models. I’d seen it before many times with tobacco, asbestos, pesticides, hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), and other industries that paid scientists to generate “science” that would support their claims of product safety.

That, of course, is not the course of sound science. Science involves generating and testing hypotheses. One draws conclusions from the available, observable evidence that results from rigorous and reproducible experimentation. Science is not sculpting evidence to support your existing beliefs. That’s propaganda. As Dr. Henry Lai (who, along with Dr. Narendra Singh, performed the groundbreaking research demonstrating DNA damage from EMF exposure discussed at greater length in chapter 4 and elsewhere in this book) explains, “a lot of the studies that are done right now are done purely as PR tools for the industry.”5

An irreversible trend

Of course EMF exposure—including radiation from smart phones, the power lines that you use to recharge them, and the other wide variety of EMF-generating technologies—is not equivalent to cigarette smoking. Exposure to carcinogens and other harmful forces from tobacco results from the purely voluntary, recreational activity of smoking. If tobacco disappeared from the world tomorrow, a lot of people would be very annoyed, tobacco farmers would have to plant other crops, and a few firms might go out of business, but there would be no additional impact.

In stark contrast, modern technology (the source of the human-made electromagnetic fields discussed in this book) has fueled a remarkable degree of innovation, productivity, and improvement in the quality of life. If tomorrow the power grid went down, all cell phone networks would cease operation, millions of computers around the world wouldn’t turn on, and the night would be illuminated only by candlelight and the moon—we’d have a lot less EMF exposure, but at the cost of the complete collapse of modern society.

EMF isn’t just a by-product of modern society. EMF, and our ability to harness it for technological purposes, is the cornerstone of modern society. Sanitation, food production and storage, health care—these are just some of the essential social systems that rely on power and wireless communication. We have evolved a society that is fundamentally reliant upon a set of technologies that generate forms and levels of electromagnetic radiation not seen on this planet prior to the 19th century.

As a result of the central role these devices play in modern life, individuals are understandably predisposed to resist information that may challenge the safety of activities that result in EMF exposures. People simply cannot bear the thought of restricting their time with—much less giving up—these beloved gadgets. This gives industry a huge advantage because there is a large segment of the public that would rather not know.

Precaution

My message in this book is not to abandon gadgets—like most people, I too love and utilize EMF-generating gadgets. Instead, I want you to realize that EMF poses a real risk to living creatures and that industrial and product safety standards must and can be reconsidered. The solutions I suggest in this book are not prohibitive. I recommend that as individuals we adopt the notion of “prudent avoidance,” minimizing our personal EMF exposure and maximizing the distance between us and EMF sources when those devices are in use. Just as you use a car with seat belts and air bags to increase the safety of the inherently dangerous activity of driving your car at a relatively high speed, you should consider similar risk-mitigating techniques for your personal EMF exposure.

On a broader social level, adoption of the Precautionary Principle in establishing new, biologically based safety standards for EMF exposure for the general public would be, I believe, the best approach. Just as the United States became the first nation in the world to regulate the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) when science indicated the threat to earth’s ozone layer—long before there was definitive proof of such a link—our governments should respond to the significant public health threat of EMF exposure. If EMF levels were regulated just as automobile carbon emissions are regulated, this would force manufacturers to design, create, and sell devices that generate much lower levels of EMF.

No one wants to return to the dark ages, but there are smarter and safer ways to approach our relationship—as individuals and across society—with the technology that exposes us to electromagnetic radiation.

This book

I have always looked to science as a reliable means of understanding a problem and as a source of information about possible solutions. My training, career, and belief in science have shown me that ultimately, knowledge is power. In the field of EMF, that knowledge is steadily growing.

The EMF issue spans physics, biology, and chemistry (as well as electrical engineering). My interdisciplinary background—which includes almost all of these fields—provides me with a valuable perspective on the issue of EMF exposure and its effect on living beings. This is what I’ve set out to relate in this book.

In the coming chapters, I will attempt to summarize and simplify the significant amount of information that I’ve learned about the health effects of EMF over the course of my career. (Those of you interested in more detailed science on these issues may review the materials referenced in the endnotes.) My goal is to demonstrate that all EMF—even at very low levels initially considered harmless—affects living beings. And the types of EMF exposures that result from increasingly common activities such as making a cell phone call, or using WiFi to access the Internet are linked with some very serious public health risks.

With this knowledge, I hope that you will do more to protect yourself and your family, work to reduce unnecessary dangers in your community, and ultimately be an informed consumer of the technology that surrounds you.

2

In my childhood, the old-fashioned air conditioner in my room was my hero. In my mind, the control dials were a pair of amber eyes, and the whirring blades a mass of tousled hair. The blades made a delectable light scratchy sound, an echo like the one that seems to rise off your skin when you wake up. Every night, the air conditioner was my own brave warrior, facing off against my nightmares and fears and the dampness of my bed. The ceiling of Dai’s room had the same effect, even though I was never able to fashion a moving image out of its stillness. The ceiling was a dumb witness; perhaps it even made a choice, somehow, to close its eyes and sleep through everything. I fastened my eyes on that ceiling and engraved that word onto the surface of my brain—the word I would have to say without any stuttering or hesitation, confidently and calmly.

A few encounters had been enough to apprise me of Dai’s temperament and essential character. I knew when she would be ready for a lull in hostilities, when she would grow angry, when she was gambling on my intelligence, when she would have me, and when she was about to let go with that laugh of hers, the sticky gluey laugh that disgusted me. The laugh of the bu’bu,' the bogey.

Soon enough, I could read her signals. If she was wearing her sky blue cotton shirt, she was in a happy, serene mood. Her braided hair would tell me that she was feeling cheerful and lively. And the movement of her fingers along the seams of my jeans would let me know that she was feeling her way toward me. Before she arrived, I had to set our destination.

Let’s go there, I said, waving my hand in the general direction of the mirror. She turned, a skeptical question on her face: There? Are you sure? Before she could actually ask it, I had her by the hand and was pulling her over to the mirror. I needed something that would save me from myself. I wanted to come out the other side of this new experience with credit in my account. And I was beginning to find it stale, this cat and mouse game, this habit of pushing things as far as they could possibly go and then suddenly announcing one’s unavailability. I undid a button and left the rest of the task for Dai’s hand, and suddenly, what seemed like it would take endless time had truly happened, startling me and riveting me, too. I hung onto the mirror, my flagrant nakedness sending me into a state of rapture I had never experienced before, a feeling of bliss at seeing myself desired like this, and escaping the laws mandated by my own body.

I was liberating me from myself. Turning my face toward the mirrors that Dai exposed as she opened the doors to her wardrobe, I was thrown off balance, distracted by these sudden and multiple images of myself. It was not just a matter of being released, of feeling free, but rather, it was a sense of no longer being able to exert a guiding hand over myself. My authority over whatever part of myself I owned was worthless. My body, dissolving beneath her and melting into clear liquid, was no longer mine to own. From that moment, Dai was my body’s commanding mistress and I became simply an organism whose body lies elsewhere, and lurks in obscure isolation, a remote, secluded place that allowed me to witness—but only as an outside observer, one who does not react. I am not part of it. I feel none of this. All I can do is to stare, my face featureless. And so I fix my gaze on what appears to be no concern of mine—or would not be, if it were not so conspicuously there, in front of my eyes.

We finished. A contorted, artificial smile lingered on my mouth as she spattered my face with her wet kisses, in her usual way. She chewed on her lip for a moment and then handed me a cotton wad, saying a few words that I could not make out. But I knew these signs—the chewed-on lip, the cotton wad—and so I knew that she had left the marks of her passage on my neck.

Far away is Dai. And my body has left me behind to travel toward a point that I cannot see from here, where I remain. My body has gone about establishing its ordinances and putting in place its distinct arrangements, devising plans for what it may reap in the coming days and weeks. Its intentions frighten me, for they are both obscure and absolute. Meanwhile I remain in my dreadful solitude, not because I don’t belong to the world, but because here I am without even a sense of belonging to myself.

The calmness I felt in the beginning turned into fear, and then into a blind capacity for anger. It was not as though I had sobered up after a spell of intoxication, for I had not been intoxicated in the first place. It was just that, of the three fingers on which I had been counting up my intentions, I had lost the third one, where I had lodged the answer to the all-important question: what shall I do? I came to Dai intending to say, Take me, and I said it. I also came to share my body with her, and I did. But then... what to do with this then of mine where all the details lay, details that I could not remember! I had not intended to stand there upset and unsteady, unable to resolve anything at all.

I began to regain my senses somewhat, to come out of the jellylike bubble that had wrapped itself around me deceptively. I found everything around me irritating. Dai grated on me: her smell, her strong breaths, the nakedness of her body, her weight pressing down on my ribcage, a few tiny hairs sprinkled around her eyebrows, her forefinger playing in my mouth, her voice, her mouth, everything that was a part of her, everything that made up her I. Her sweet little singularities that had dizzied me time after time now showed themselves as petty details. This, I had not been able to see. Or rather, this—these trivialities, unrecognized—gave me purchase to diminish her. And the other one remaining between us, in the form of a lavish register of quarrels, insults and ruptures, grew to fill my eyes beyond the limits of my visible horizons.

I shivered. And shivered and shivered. She covered me with her body and began to rub my hand in hers, but it had no effect. It was not the cold that was making me shiver. It was something else, something unknown, buried somewhere deep. I could not stop shivering. I could not control my limbs. I tried hard to fix my mind on something, anything, a particular thought that could extract me from this suspect impasse, but nothing came to the rescue. I wanted to escape Dai, so I turned away from her. I pulled into myself, jerking my legs upward and close to my chest and covering my face with my arms and hands, palms interlaced. She began to lick the abrasions on my back, her own fingernail scratches and the other light marks caused by my skin rubbing against the carpet’s roughness. I could not help seeing myself as a swamp, a marshland of saliva and moist breathing; she was a cat, licking my wounds that would not heal.

Her fingertips played with my ears. Any regrets? she asked me. I shook my head, no, I didn’t regret this. The truth was that regret was not on my list when it came to anything in my life. I would do something or not do it—in either case, I would not have a lot to lose. So it was an experience: I went through it, and I learned something. Regret would mean backing off, distancing myself from my own action. Regret would mean erasing some experience, taking a brick out of the structure that was me—and no structure remains standing when it loses a foundation stone. No, I did not feel any regret. Just loathing. I was full of disgust. All at once I had seen my body’s power to turn animal-like. I had realized how very faithful it could be to its basest instincts. How completely shameless it was. And who was I to curb its reckless lusts?

I would not be one to ban my body’s longings, if only I could understand what they are and fathom what they mean. I wish my body had been kind enough to begin a little conversation with me on the subject. If only my body and I could sum up my longings in a few clear points. I am not an angel and I do not proclaim any pure and perfect virtue. And this would not have been my first baby step toward hell in any case. The whole deal is that I just need to understand. This dark, murky chaos is killing me. It kills me to be driven straight into this nighttime of the blind, where at the end there is no daylight to look kindly down on me.

I must get away now. I am choking to death. My chest floats in a bed of dark mud, and kisses steal my breaths from me in a room where the air is foul. This is not happening. It has not happened. I will go out of this room now, and I will fall. I will tumble into a well of oblivion. With a little bit of effort, I will be able to forget. I will be able to slip out in silence, outside of Dai. If I open the door, new air will come bursting into this room and I can fill my chest with it. I can run. Memory does not have two legs that can carry it against the wind. I can pray. God will be generous with me; God will wipe from the list of my sins another black mark. I can kiss my mother and I will not find that bitter taste returning to my mouth, the taste of my burning intoxication: Dai.

3

My filthiness is not the kind I can wash away with soap and water. I am tired of repeatedly washing my hands and my mouth, tired of bathing so often, tired of the fear I cannot help feeling every time I sleep on my back or part my legs. After all of this has happened, I cannot wipe an enormous eraser across my body and mind to bring back the whiteness of their surfaces, the whiteness of the page. Dai sliced me into two parts: my body, glorying in its confections, and my self, so determined on purification from its offenses. How horrifically enormous my offense was when measured against the authority of the morals I had amassed through years of instruction. That accumulated moral sense of mine gave pride of place in its statutes to my body, for that was the measure by which I would be evaluated and judged, and then moved into one of two categories: pure woman or slut. Taahira or aahira.

And so I was aahira, a slut, and I had conducted myself to hell. Before me lay two solutions by which I could bring back my twin and regain the duality that was me, unalterable and coincidental, body and spirit. I could seek forgiveness for my sin, or I could live under the protective umbrella of denial, not simply denial of what I had done, but also of the painful notion that lay hidden behind it, which told me that I was something other than what people naturally are. I could deny it until, with time, what I had done would be forgotten, so that the sin would lose its stark sin-like image. That way, I would always be a guilty corrupt victim ready for the guillotine known as my conscience. But when the burden of that image would fall from my back, my feelings of shame and ignominy might end.

But I did not choose. The choices were not clear to my eyes, blinded to everything but the horrendous magnitude of my sin. I was alone, left to stumble hopelessly forward. Since our first kiss (with its secretive connivance), everything had progressed so gradually and, it seemed, smoothly, that one would think there existed some prior agreement between us that things would happen just as they did, from the most trivial details, the precise shape of a kiss, all the way to the grandest issues about how it all happened, encompassing along the way all of those shy preliminary skirmishes, and culminating in my complete and utter detachment from my body, my granting her my body in its wholeness through that gradual progression of our acts. I did not even really catch onto how much of a battleground I had become over two months of wars and lean victories. Nor had I given any thought to what the next step might be. What happened was like some cheap poster hung on the wall and held fast by many nails on either end. No sooner would one person finish working on it before another would begin, and so it would start to split slowly, slowly... so slowly that no one would even notice a thing, not even that the panel had become two sections that were entirely separated, indeed, ripped violently apart.

If only my mother had paid attention, I said to myself. If only Hassan had not been defeated. If only I had not despised Dai and been crazy in love with her at the same time. If only there had been someone there. O Lord, anyone. If only God were not so stern and hard. If only fate had struck a blow the way it normally does, surprising me with some tiny alteration in some little event, anything, in the normal course of my life at that time. If only my final exams had happened to be just then. If only it were not the new millennium. If only I had not been in a state of total exhaustion and overstrain, and if only I had not been totally insane at the time with something called Experience! But at least Freud is not here to explain everything about my present fix by linking it back to my mother not nursing me enough. Nor is there a candle I can light, nor do I have a wailing wall.

I wanted to undergo the experience but I did not balance my accounts: I did not think about the price that would be demanded of me. With the mark of my sin carved into the palm of my right hand, I found myself unable to pay. The cost was huge and my wallet was empty. I tried my hand at concocting a rift, fast and complete; I thought perhaps I could make a total break with the event which I hoped to fix in my mind as a part of the irretrievable past that it was futile to unearth. I immersed myself in an endless series of intense connections, my lines open—and impossibly tangled—to girlfriends who did not particularly mean anything to me. I emptied my datebook of its emptiness, and filled my schedule with meetings, more or less, according to my varying level of absorption in the activities of the Hussainiyya, as the ending rituals of Ramadan drew near. None of it was any use. While I was busy, and my time slipped away in the swarm of appointments, and rarely was I by myself, I could not keep my mind from whirling, gyrating on the same waterwheel time and again, and stopping always at that night of mine with Dai, never getting beyond it, as if all places, and time itself, had frozen there.

We had just finished putting together the program for the Charity Tray, which would take place on the hallowed twenty-seventh of Ramadan, the Night of Power, when verses from the Qur’an were first revealed, as the Qur’an tells us. People would buy food coupons and we would distribute the proceeds to the poor. Now it was time to start organizing the festivities to honor the girls who would successfully complete our three training modules—Prayer and Piety, Morals, and the Articles of Faith—and the women who had served as volunteer instructors. We had to come up with a budget, calculating the minimum funds we would realistically need to put this event on. We had to schedule it, making sure that the date we chose would not conflict with anything that anyone else in any other section was doing, and then adhering to it. It meant we had to assign roles and choose a signature theme for the ceremony. We had to decide on the program and speakers, contacting Hussainiyya women known to be good orators or those who wrote for religious magazines. We would need to select token gifts for the volunteer teachers, and arrange with a stationer to print the necessary number of diplomas. We might ask a group of graduating students to recite verses from the Qur’an. Then there were the opening remarks to write, as well as introductions for each part of the program and the concluding words. The event had to be publicized by means of fliers hung in the front windows of the grocery shops, handed out around the open-air Basta market with its cheap goods spread across the ground, and distributed to Internet listservs. And we were the ones who would spend the two final days before the event decorating the walls and ceiling of the Hussainiyya, reconfirming the time and place with everyone involved, and holding a final rehearsal for the dramatic presentation, if we decided to have one. There would be a few headaches arising from the inevitable last-minute changes and necessary back-up plans, or from disagreements among participants, or because some would count on others to do all of the work.

My particular challenge was that I had to see Dai almost every day. It was not just a question of seeing her as she passed me by in the building, or of the two of us being in the same place. I had to be prepared for long discussions with her since she was an essential component of our small group, and indeed was the one to sign off on every step we took. To all appearances, we gave the impression of a strong and practical collegiality that went no further. Everyone thought we had a great working relationship, judging by our success at jointly coming up with program ideas. Everybody thought that was all we had. To all appearances, we were simply two individuals whose relationship had not undergone any change or had any special or private dimension throughout the nearly three years in which they had been active participants in the same venture.

We had not come to any advance agreement about keeping our relationship secret, because nothing called for such an agreement. This was the best thing to happen of its own accord, in a relationship that in the space of a few months had suffered a great deal from repeated and dramatic starts and stops. I was truly grateful to her that this, at least, was not an issue.

Despite my genuine participation in organizing a successful end-of-Ramadan program, I did not feel for a moment that I had offered an appropriate admission of guilt to God, nor even to myself, not to mention the act of contrition that should accompany it. I remained submerged in my sense of embarrassed disgrace, the tormenting feeling I had that my sin dripped visibly in huge drops off my limbs. I knew in advance that I had been acting out of my need to consume the empty time I had at my disposal, so that I would not actually have to encounter myself and start quarreling again with the reason I was. I had done it to soften the sharp pain of seeing myself so broken and dejected; I had done it so that enough time would pass that I could mold justifications that would convince me, or construct a state of oblivion whose coming would sweep away the images etched on my memory.

My self-disgust underwent a transformation; it went from being a row of huge exclamation points to a series of question marks whose sharp points abraded my chest. That was when I initiated my oddest phase on the Internet, even though all the gateways to sex were firmly shut. This did not mean that there were no peculiar side trips—for example, when I searched Yahoo’s listservs. They had not drawn my attention before. I discovered that Yahoo was off limits to lesbian groups. That was the work of the contractor who supplied web access for the whole of Aramco. Male homosexual listservs were legit, and that is why I immersed myself in them, joining one after another, to the point where my daily consumption of subscriber emails was up to twenty different groups and my inbox was polluted by wave after wave of images and tales. None of this gave me what I was looking for. I was in search of beginnings and their causes; I was looking for how transformations happen, how the body’s desire is formed and molded. I was searching for the causes provoking a body that had been clean and became dirty.

My most jarring habit was entering particular chat rooms. I had only done this previously on a trial basis. The site would be quiet and very disciplined throughout the day, because censors regularly checked in. Over the last third of the night, though, it would mutate into a sex bazaar. Everyone tossed their most intractable desires into the ring and waited for someone with similar inclinations to show up. I was no better than any of them, and I did attract some attention, from some of the homos of course, of both sexes. With the guys I took up the role of the bashful young man. As fatuous as this role was, it would quickly fool them. I was learning; in fact, I was getting some fast seasoning, for I began passing things I heard from one person on to someone else as my own personal experiences. I would make the details my own, summoning up a personality suitable to the role I was playing. And so I harvested an inconceivable number of weird practices and unruly appetites. Meanwhile, the young women would easily and rapidly discover how very inexperienced I was, or how difficult it was to get to me, or they would unleash doubts about what my sexual identity really was, quickly making their annoyance clear and hastening to distance themselves from me.

It was a while later that I turned to a more serious form of research. I read all the pages the Google search engine would give me when I typed in the English words homosexual and bisexual. The pages that came up made my head hurt. I felt as though they were forcing upon me awareness, an acknowledgment, of an orientation that was not really mine. And yet the pages that came up on the screen when I searched for the Arabic equivalent, al-mithliyya al-jinsiyya, all veered from tahrim to tajrim, interdiction to criminalization. That would drive me to close the window before I could even finish reading, as these pages screamed into my face that I was rocking God’s throne in His heaven. Finally, I resorted to my own thought processes. No doubt, here was where all of the answers were, in my own body. But my body would always shut the doors in my face and recede.

I could not abandon my shame. I would shift my eyes away from the mirror in my room, and I draped a cloth over the bathroom mirror so that I would not see myself naked as I bathed. In fact, I went back to bathing with my underclothes on, a practice I had shed a few years before. I was so mortified that I could not place my hand on any part of my body, even if accidentally; I could not move a bar of soap across my own skin. The shame was like an enormous pair of steel boots stomping across my chest.

I went on like this, in a state of estrangement from myself, while my body began to truly harass me with its demands. I was perfectly conscious of when I could fend it off and when I had to take its desires seriously. But the touchstone here was what it was that my body wanted. Not pieces of candy, nor two extra hours of sleep. What it wanted was an other sin, one that would lower the water level again, an experience that would break yet another bone and color the skin above it with bruises. The critical thing now was that my body itself had become an offense, a sin, and I must bury it as quickly as I possibly could, for otherwise it would get the better of me and slip from my grasp once again.

With a Spotify playlist of Troupe's favorite Miles Davis tracks at the end of the interview

Dan: In his introduction to this new edition of Miles & Me, former Village Voice and Spin magazine editor turned celebrated film producer Rudy Langlais shares how you first came to get to know Miles, as he remembers it. We wanted to start with Rudy because that takes us all the way back, kind of to the beginning, 1985.

Quincy: Rudy tells the history, where we met and all that. Which is cool with me, because he was talking about me as a writer, which took me a little off guard, and because he left it to me to talk about the book.

Dan:Miles & Me feels so natural, because the friendship between you and Miles propels the story forward. How did this book happen?

Quincy: When I first spent time with Miles, it was to interview him for Spin magazine. But almost from the first meeting, it was bigger than that. And it was kind of strange because, how Miles was, well, he was very idiosyncratic. I had a bad knee at the time, which he didn't know of course, but he liked to test people, find out what you were made of, so he made me wait, standing upright, on my feet, for about a half hour while he was drawing.

Miles and I had met before. He had said he liked my sense of style. But he didn't rememebr that. So for him, this was our first time meeting. Of course, I knew him as a musician. We were both from St. Louis—East St. Louis, Illinois, in his case, St. Louis, Missouri, across the Mississippi River, in my case. The first band he played in, when he was about seventeen or eighteen, was my mother's first cousin Eddie Randle's band. Eddie was an undertaker, one of the leading undertakers in St. Louis, but also a great musician. And I loved the music, but I don't think I ever met Miles back then.

So when I went over to Miles' apartment in New York City, standing, waiting for him to be ready to be interviewed, that really pissed me off. So, finally, he invited me to sit down. He was staring at me from behind his sunglasses. Then all of a sudden he reached across the table with his long fingers, and grabbed all the hair in my dreadlocks, and said, "How did you get your hair likes this, is this your real hair?" First off, I was shocked when he grabbed my hair like that, and since I didn't like anyone invading my personal space, I slapped his hand, just by reflex. And he pulled his hand back, and he said, "Motherfucker, are you crazy? Why you hit me like that?" And I said, "No, I'm not crazy." And I pointed at him and then at myself, and I said, "Miles' space, Quincy's space. Just because I'm here to interview you, and you're a famous person, does not give you a right to invade my space." And then I repeated it again, "Miles' space, Quincy's space." And then his mouth flickered a little, kind of like he was thinking a smile but the smile hadn't completed the journey yet. And then he said, "Motherfucker, where are you from." And I said, "St. Louis." And he said, "Now I know you're crazy." And I said, "Not only that, the first band you played in was my cousin Eddie Randle's band." And he said, "Eddie Randle is your cousin?" And he took his glasses off then, and he said, "Well then, motherfucker, ask me a question."

Dan: I don't think I've ever heard of an interview that started like that.

Quincy: I was supposed to be there for one hour and a half. He only gave one or two interviews a year to American journalists. When Rudy Langlais, my editor at Spin, asked me who was on my wish list to interview for Spin, I had told Rudy Miles Davis was at the top of my list, followed my Michael Jackson and Chuck Berry. But Miles was at the top. The publicist at the time for Columbia Records was Sandra Trim-DaCosta, who happened to be one of my former students. So when Rudy put my name in and it came across her desk, among the probably hundreds of requests to interview Miles at that time, she plucked my name from the pile, which is how that all happened, a little luck came into play in that way.

So she told me I'd have an hour and a half, then she told me Miles lived at 79th and Fifth Avenue, on the fourteenth floor. So a week or so later I drove down in my bronze 1983 Saab, and went up.

Dan: Now that you were sitting down, and had Miles' attention, what happened next?

Quincy: I started to talk to him and ask him my questions. After a while, he said, "You want some food?" I said yes and he ordered in for us. "Do you want to hear some music?" And we did that. After a couple hours, Sandra came in to see how we were doing. And she suggested that we wrap up. But Miles said to her, "You ain't my fuckin' mother, we cool." So she left, and we kept going. And I was there that day for thirteen hours, and back the next day. And I had the tape recorder on and we just kept going. I had to call home to tell my wife, Margaret, that I wouldn't be there for dinner, and she asked me, "Can I speak to Miles?" And when he said yes and came on the phone she called him Mr. Davis, but he said, "Call me Miles." When I had to leave, he asked me if I could drop him off downtown on my way home. And when he sees my car, which I was proud of, he said, "What kind of piece of shit is this?" And I said, "It's the piece of shit that's going to take you downtown if you shut your mouth." He laughed and said, "All right, Quincy." And then he asked me if he could put something in the tape deck. And I said sure, and he put in the music that would become Tutu. After two tunes, he asked me what I thought. And I said I didn't like them. "You didn't like them?" And then he played some more of it, and I liked those.

Before I dropped him off, I asked him if I could call him if I had any more questions. So he gave me his New York and LA numbers, but he told me not to give them to anybody, and I teased him about that, saying, "Oh, you don't want me to give them to everybody?" And he liked that I teased him like that. And that was the first day, the first of many when we spent real time together, but it was a very long meeting, and by the end we knew each other, in the sense that we knew we could trust each other.

Dan: I get that.

Quincy: So, later on, after I transcribed everything and dropped it on Rudy's desk, it made a sound like a gun going off, because there was more than enough for a whole book right there, and after Spin published the two-part article, and Miles loved it like he did, he didn't want anybody else to write about him but me. So when the publisher called about doing Miles' autobiography, saying Miles wanted me to do the book, I didn't want to do it at first, but then I did it. In the autobiography, you don't see me in that book anywhere. I decided that I was going to write that book in his voice only, because he had a unique voice and I thought I could capture it and make it the book he wanted it to be. He was a great storyteller and I thought I could capture that too. I had no thoughts of mine in it. That was the way to do that book, and I'm really glad I did it that way.

So this book, Miles & Me, would be about our friendship. I wanted the readers to see another side of Miles, through my eyes, and as honest as I could make it. No holds barred. How he talked about me, and to me. And what kind of person he was. Because Miles was a beautiful person. He was very shy. He did not trust people. But if he trusted you he was very generous. Like, for example, he asked me to go talk to Jimmy Baldwin. Now James Baldwin was a friend of mine also, I didn't know Miles knew him as well as he did. Miles wanted me to talk to Jimmy for the autobiography. Miles thought he would have something to say that would be important. I said, "But he's in France." And he said, "Yeah, I know he's in France. I'll pay for your airfare, first class, and I'll cover your hotels and give you some money to spend while you're there." So he made a call and gave me five or ten thousand dollars in spending money for my trip. And he gave me names of people to see and Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where Baldwin lived. This was all for the autobiography.

And after the autobiography came out, he said, "I know you want to do a book about me, but don't write about me for a while." And I told him I wouldn't. And so, I waited, like he wanted, until after he died in 1991.

Dan: Friendship takes so many different forms. There's not one way. But I feel the strength of your friendship was all in unexpected ways in which you have helped each other, and that the autobiography and this book are both examples of that.

Quincy: Later, I went out to teach at the University of California, San Diego. Miles still was alive. And I was going up to LA to see him. And the book had come out and had been very big. It happened that I had to go to Minnesota for a residency to do some readings. And when I got back Margaret was at the airport in San Diego waiting for me when I got in, and she said, "I have to tell you, Miles had a stroke. And his sister wants to know if you want to come up to see him." And so I called Dorothy up at his house in Malibu. And I asked her how he was, and she said not good and that he was all wired up and unresponsive, strokes ran in their family, and that she didn't think he was going to make it. Miles and I had been talking about doing a project together, a musical, with me doing the libretto and him doing the music. And our last conversation, that very week, we'd been laughing and talking about the project on the phone when I was in Minesota. So, no, I told Dorothy I didn't want to see him in that state. I wanted the last memory to be of our last conversation that had been so good.

Dan: I'm sorry, Quincy. Let's take a break, and come back in a few.

***

Dan: What's funny is that Miles & Me is not a sad book. You knew and Miles knew too there was going to be this other book, and that it would be different from the first one you did together. What was your process going into it?

Quincy: What happened was, sometime in the nineties, 1993 or 1994, around there, I got to thinking about what kind of book I would do if I were going to do something on Miles.

So I made a deal with myself. I decided I would write a foreword and an epilogue, and then see where I was at with writing something about Miles and my relationship with him. I knew if I could get the beginning and the ending, then it'd be okay.

So I started to think about how he played, and that he was such a great player and that he could play in all kinds of ways. Like, some people couldn't play tender the way he could, and then play fast. So I tried to describe that in this prologue. And I came to this place where what I said was that he was a great poet on his instrument, and I decided to put that first. And I remember where he said, "Yeah, I don't like poetry, I don't read poetry or none of that shit, but I'm like a poet. "Really?" I said. "Like how?" And he said, "Well, I hear that poets write with an economy of words. And I know that so many musicians play too many notes, but I don't do that. I like to play with economy, like a poet does."

And I had interviewed all the guys who were living who knew him in East St. Louis, all the guys in the band, who are mostly dead now, and I'd put what they said into his voice in the autobiography. They had told me that he was odd. All his life he was odd, an eccentric. But they gave him space, because they knew that he was a genius. So they gave him space, and he always treated them with respect.

And he had always told me that he had heard this old lady's voice out in the woods of Arkansas when he was walking out of his uncle's house, an old woman's voice singing in a country chuch that he heard that time. He never saw her. Only heard her when he was walking in the woods. And that was the sound he chose to imitate when he made Kind of Blue.

And if you had the privilege of hearing that voice . . . [Miles & Me, pg. 3]

He heard that voice, and he tried to get it, especially on Kind of Blue. That was his big influence.

So I tried to capture that in my prologue. See, Miles' voice, his sound, wasn't specifically that of a trumpet. He loved Louis Armstrong. But he had the genius to understand that he could transfer that human voice, that voice of people, to his horn. And when you're in the woods and you hear the sound of the singing from the church in the air, that's everything you need to convey, it's musical and it's something more than music too.

And Miles tried to perfect that sound as he grew as a trumpet player. He kept that idea, that aim, his whole life.

So you couldn't pursue Miles. He had to choose you. And he chose me to write his autobiography. That was such a personal choice on his part.

Dan: Do you know why he chose you?

Quincy: I can tell you what Miles told Gary Giddens, the jazz critic and author: that he chose me because I'm black, and I'm from St. Louis. He was from East St. Louis and only the Mississippi River separated the two cities, but the culture amongst the black people was the same. In many ways I was like he was, so I could finish his sentences, and understand him spiritually.

Dan: You wrote the prologue and then you moved all the way to what would become the last thing in the book, the epilogue, and wrote that next?

Quincy: Yes. So for the epilogue the idea was to recapture his life force if I could, the power of what I called "an unreconstructed black man."

Unreconstructed black men don't have the manner of their reconstructed "Negro" brethren, who are always trying to put on a 'civilized' face on their blackness, especially in the company of white folks . . .

I miss him and so the goal of the epilogue was to see if I could conjure him up, bring him back in terms of remembering him in some way that would be meaningful to me—like could I, by writing about him, remember something I might not remember in the same way if I didn't write about him?

Dan: And you found you could do that, do that in the way you're describing? It was a very beautiful and high bar you were setting for yourself.

Quincy: Yes. I found as I wrote the epilogue that Miles as I knew him felt close again. So I knew I could do this book. I wanted to talk about him as a musician. About how important he was. And the periods where he was searching and wasn't always that good. Like after his five-year absence, his chops weren't as good. So when he came back in 1980, he was not up to par. But you know what, in time he did get up to par again, through constant work and practice.

I loved that fact that he wanted to get back. And toward the end he really did get there. And that was wonderful.

And throughout the book I wanted to talk about how Miles was as a person. He could be an asshole. And he could be very generous. In times of personal difficulty, you could count on him. I always found that. Miles would call, even if he was overseas, to tell me that whatever I needed I could count on him. He was loyal and generous—not halfway, not three-quarters of the way, but all the way.

You seldom find people like that. And I wanted to convey that in this book.

And how funny he was. People need to know that about Miles. And how shy he was. He was not a racist at all. He didn't care what race you were. He could like or love someone of any race.

After telling the story of the autobiography from Miles' point of view—you can't find me in there, not even for a single word—I guess I really needed to write about the experience I had with Miles in a way that included my experience and who I am. Miles was too important to me, our friendship was too important, for me to leave that story unwritten.

We are standing in an empty warehouse in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. It is the first day on the set of the movie based on Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy. I don’t know exactly who is clamoring toward the monitors, I just know that we all are. Later, I will come to realize that many who kneel down toward the light of the screens to take a snapshot with their smartphones are, in form, called Continuity People.

And so am I, I think, obliquely.

A Continuity Person keeps the reality of the artificial world of the film intact, maintains the integrity of the fiction by making sure that glasses don’t fill themselves, ashes don’t reconstitute themselves into cigarettes, and time works in only one way—forward. In writing this memoir shortly after the experience of embodying JT LeRoy had ended, I had a similar expectation: that the conventions of the form would impose a linear shape to the mass of memory and emotion coalescing and diffusing within me.

I wanted to trace how I had come from point A, agreeing to do a one-time appearance as a fictional alter ego of my brother’s partner at the time, writer Laura Albert, to point Q, six years of becoming so deeply entangled with this fictional character and the writer that I could barely think of myself without him or his creator. Writing down the story from memory became a process, not of convincing, thankfully, but of specificity in viewpoint.

This viewpoint is told from the perspective and experience of the object. Yes, I just called myself an object. That’s the thing about getting inside of your own meta-world—you become your own disassociated ant moving through space in service to the story, and any detail of your life is always readily available to pluck and plunk into the master script. Sometimes you have to address whether the story is running roughshod over what you want as an actual object in the world. I became used to referring to myself—even existing in—the third-person, which, it turns out, is exactly as liberatory and circumscribed as the first person. I just ran up against parameters in different places.

My story is the story of multiple bodies trying to occupy one body; specifically, Laura and her fictional alter ego JT and me all trying to occupy my body. Things get tricky when there is no space. And that is maybe the challenge that kept me coming back for more JT experiences. I wanted to see how much could be housed in this body. At moments, like a chorus, these multiple voices come together to share one consciousness in sync. At other moments, the story holds just one person trying to fit into another’s very specific set of terms; another person trying to cram everything they need in the world into another’s set of terms. The story, told from memory, ends up being the messiness and complication of two people’s intimacy, the constant testing of each other’s boundaries. Savannah and Laura’s desires fuel the action in the story— why they want what they want, potentially a series of pathologized reasons tethered to the past, becomes irrelevant. It is what they want, in the present and in the future, that keeps them with each other and with JT, and propels them through time. At the moment of the reveal, this tenuous balancing act collapses. When the world crowds in, that is when I discover the limits of what my body can hold.

In writing the screenplay for Girl Boy Girl, cowritten with the film’s director, Justin Kelly, once again I found myself retelling the story, and felt the changing shape of it under my fingers. Story glitches—an outsized emotion, an unforgettable image, a motivation that once felt so personal and now can barely be remembered—are smoothed and traced over again, transposing memories until the logistics fade and the emotions materialize as one clear trajectory. Stepping away from the cluster at the monitor, I zoom in on the actors’ faces on my handheld device—dumbstruck by the familiar yet alien gestures caught on screen, the spazz-out campy stress mouth of Laura’s fictional author, JT, the knee bend, the hands up dramatically toward the sky of Laura’s fictional best friend/manager of JT, Speedie.

A day and a half before the movie begins shooting, I am driving with my sweetheart, Lee, through the blinding light and low scrub brush of the Badlands when I receive a text from Justin. He wonders if I could make up a few sentences of JT prose for the reading scheduled to shoot the following Monday. As Lee drives, I pull out my old beat-up laptop from the backseat, and stretch my legs up on the dashboard, staring at my socks, feeling absolutely hopeless. A few pithy sentences. That’s all. Think about style. Think about . . . emotion. I try to move my mind toward the proposed word puzzle—something that points to the prose, but is not the prose itself. I look out at the side mirror, the plumes of dust rising in the wake of our car. I haven’t read the JT books in a while, but they are, to some degree, seared into my brain. There is a part, I mumble, where JT and his mom are on a road trip, and she anoints him as her map reader, and he can’t really read the map, but he pretends he can so that he can hold his mother’s attention. I look ahead. Fill me up, spirit, fill me with some idea, with words! Lee starts to say something about there is a blade of light, an ashtray flying through the air. I type rapidly. And the cigarette butts scattered on the ground, words dart like small fish from our mouths and we catch them, and transfer them into different vessels, like we are cleaning the water in a fish bowl. The sun has risen to its highest point, and the land shivers around us as if we’re surrounded by a lake. JT, he arranges them . . . in a row . . . tap tap tap . . . color-coding them with . . . circles . . . with rings, with lipstick rings . . . we pour the bright fish back into their bowl. Each shade a different secret need. As we hit a main artery road, we speed down the freshly paved highway. Whizzing past the freshly rolled haystacks, we are elated, ready to start another piece of text—Lee blurts out, My buddy Lucky’s got the goods!

And then abruptly we are pulled over by a cop for speeding. Fuck! The car is a mess, full of crap from both of our lives commuting back and forth between coasts. I look down to notice my seat smeared with chocolate, my feet wading in corn husks (raw corn a favorite of this trip), orange peels, trash, and cracker crumbs. By happenstance we are white, and not by happenstance, the cop lets us move on without too much ado.

That night we get in to Bowbells, North Dakota, and find the number of a woman advertising that she has a few cabins on a lot for rent. There is a constant steady cool wind blowing, like a kiss. In bed with the window open, we hold each other. I lie awake. Now in the night, as the wind floats through the curtains toward our heads, it feels more pressing, insistent, I can feel my anxiety matching it. The winds of memory glitching. Into the future and into the past.

When I wrote the memoir, one of the last things that Laura said to me was, “Just because you played a writer doesn’t mean you are one.” Looking back on it, I wonder about that. It feels mysterious to me. Writing fiction is a space of possibility for inhabiting different consciousnesses. For impersonation. Is writing only in the saying, or can it also be in the doing, out in the world? Speeding down that highway with Lee, writing under deadline, about to arrive at the movie set, which felt like some approaching mirage, there was something about that moment that felt—not exactly like playing a writer, but like living inside some reality that was not quite my own. Because the proposal of the day had been to write someone else’s words, I was free to imagine and to speak with a different voice. I had tapped into the joy of pretending. Joy— which enters suddenly, and then leaves as fast as it came.

Granted, the pact on the “page” between author and reader is quite different from the terms with which individuals out in the world interact. Out in JT land the boundaries are blurry, hard to read, and ever shifting. There might, indeed, be a reason why people don’t often “play” with this sort of writing/performance vérité out in the world—and that is that the complete blurring of the lines between fiction and lived experience can fundamentally fuck with you and everyone around you.

There are other versions of the story, from other points of view. I’m vaguely certain that art cannot be everything for everyone, and in telling the story as specifically as I can I hope it inspires others toward their own individual perspectives.

Girl Boy Girl is a portrait of a young person’s life in which an artist (Laura) upends my core belief system and changes the way I think about the world and the making of art and life forever. My life with Laura, with JT, and many experiences since have shown me that one set of terms does not work for everyone else. Lived experience, felt experience, and imagined experience all combine to construct our idea of reality. The hard drawing of the line between truth and fiction is artificial and will always work to empower some voices and muzzle others, regardless of where the division is made.

I used to feel certain that reality was a complete construction. These days, whether because I have grown older, or because current events in our political climate have gotten so fantastical (with real consequences), I’m not certain. To quote the Savannah character in the movie, “All I’m sure about is that I am not so sure.” But every time I revisit this story it reminds me that truth is a constructed reality formed by many sources, that the most pointed moments of reveal are usually a convergence of years of multiple actions, often, a tangle of call and response from multiple parties that rarely fit tidily into a headline or a sound bite.

One of America's best loved writers, Nelson Algren won the first National Book Award for Fiction in 1950. But his star faded following harassment by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI during the McCarthy era and changes in literary fashion. Now there's a Nelson Algren revival going on. Colin Asher's epic biography Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algrenarrives from Norton in April and is already receiving rave reviews from the likes of the New Yorker.

Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon's essay in the current Nationdetails why Nelson Algren matters so much—not just as a literary figure, but for us all, right here, right now. According to Simon, Asher's biography "delivers a wrenching portrait of a man who struggled to maintain his sanity and his spirit in a society that was well prepared to see its writers give up or sell out, but struggled to comprehend writers who persevered and paid the price as Algren did."

And speaking of right here, right now, take 75% off all e-books by Algren on the Seven Stories website. Click on any of the books below, or check out the collection right here.

Algren and Kurt Vonnegut were good friends, having taught together at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1965–7. See Malcolm Jack's piece in today's New York Times on the 50th Anniversary of Slaughterhouse Five.

MarÍa Luisa ElÍo: Gabo said: “I have to retire for a year and I’m not going to work. You see how you can arrange things,” he said to Mercedes. “We’ll see how you do, but I’m not working for a year.” And Mercedes arranged things the best she could.

Guillermo Angulo: She got credit.

MarÍa Luisa ElÍo: Borrowing the meat from the butcher.

Guillermo Angulo: She got money from one place and another. And he began to write. To write with that discipline that only he has. Like the architect Rogelio Salmona, who lives in the apartment next to mine. Like him. Salmona doesn’t have a cent (he’s done the greatest buildings in Colombia) because he says: “I don’t like it” and he does the building all over again, paying for it out of his own pocket. They’re very good friends, besides. He designed Gabo’s house in Cartagena, and the presidential guesthouse there too.

Emmanuel Carballo: He left everything. He worked He saved. He borrowed money and began to write One Hundred Years of Solitude like a desperate man. Like a madman. He didn’t do anything else. He stopped seeing friends. Doing things. Working on things that paid him some money. He borrowed money so he could sit down and write One Hundred Years.

MarÍa Luisa ElÍo: He had written notes but nothing else because that room Mercedes made so he could go in and write the whole blessed day wasn’t made yet. They lived in a little house on Calle de la Loma. In the living room Mercedes had a wall built with a wooden door that went all the way up so there’d be no noise, and a pine table like a kitchen table with an old typewriter. Gabo went in there and spent the whole day, all day, writing. The room was a very tiny thing, tinier than this, which is very small, like from here over to that point. There was room for his table, a chair, a small armchair, everything that fit was very small. Above the armchair was a painting and something like a calendar. But a very tacky calendar.

Emmanuel Carballo: He dressed like a peasant. He dressed very badly. Very ugly. Shabby, a peasant trying to be elegant who ends up being just the opposite. That’s what dressing like a peasant means.

MarÍa Luisa ElÍo: Then we would go there every night. Since Gabo wasn’t going out, we would go to see them every night. We’d arrive around eight o’clock. One day with a bottle of whiskey. The next day with a piece of ham. And there we’d stay, drinking a little and eating things Mercedes made. We’d see one another every day. We would also see the Mutises there. The kids upstairs, in their rooms, doing wild things.

Emmanuel Carballo: And now here comes something that only I can tell you about. When Gabo began to work on this novel, he asked me if I could read the pages he wrote every week. So every Saturday he’d come see me with what he had written during the week.

MarÍa Luisa ElÍo: I stayed home a good deal, reading all afternoon, not doing anything, and he would call me. Gabriel would say: “I’m going to read you a little bit, let’s see what you think.” And he would read me a passage. He would call me and say: “I’m going to tell you how the aunts are dressed. What else would you put on them? What color do you think the dress is?” And we would talk. Or he’d say to me: “Look, I’ve put this word here but I don’t know what it means. Did your aunts say it? Because mine did.” Like that. It was marvelous. We spent time talking on the phone. How the women are dressed, I don’t know which one, just a minute, when she goes to catch the train . . . I think it’s from a magazine I had in the house about things from the 1920s.

Margarita de la Vega: You know the story when he’s writing One Hundred Years of Solitude and I heard him telling it. He needed the Encyclopaedia Britannica to verify the things he wanted to use that were part of the world. Because that’s the really nice thing about One Hundred Years for me, that it’s a vernacular, universal, and encyclopedic book all at the same time. That’s why One Hundred Years of Solitude sells so much and is read so much: because you can be a Colombian janitor (not a gringo janitor who goes to Columbia and graduates, like the one who was in the paper yesterday or the day before, but a Colombian), read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and understand it on a level different from the level of the scholar who looks up all the references and all that nonsense. He lives the story, the tragedies, the family, the evolution, the historical context, because he’s somebody who has lived it and suffered it and heard it talked about in his family. It isn’t something they read in books. It’s part of their culture.

Emmanuel Carballo: From the beginning I admired García Márquez a great deal. I liked his stories and novels very much. I thought he was a great writer. I mean, he brought me the first installment of what he was writing; he brought it punctually every Saturday. Every Saturday he brought me the novel until he finished it and said to me: "What defects do you find in it? Tell me the things you don’t like, why you don’t like them." And I said: “Yes, well, yes I like it. The novel’s stupendous. Keep doing what you’re doing. I have nothing to tell you and nothing to criticize you for. On the contrary, I praise you.” And that’s how it went until he finished the novel. At the most, I deleted two or three things and added something. That’s what my work on One Hundred Years of Solitude was reduced to. It was perfect. I didn’t have anything to do except tell him: “It’s wonderful, this character is growing, this one you’re moving to the side, I don’t know why, but in the next few weeks you’ll tell me what that’s due to.” We talked about the characters. They were our friends. We talked for two or three hours, but not as teacher to pupil but as friend to friend, and I was a fan. I use that word that perhaps belongs more to soccer than to literature. It’s a novel made almost with a superhuman gust of wind. I’ve been a literary critic for sixty years, and I’ve never seen a novel written with so much skill, so much talent, so much dedication as I saw in Gabo writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. He chose me, then, because I’m very talented. If not, he wouldn’t have chosen me. I don’t believe in modesty. I had written about all the novels he had previously published. He knew I was implacable, that if I didn’t like something I would say so, I would tell him why it was bad or why it was good. And that’s why he chose me. And he found in me a person excited by a talent I hadn’t seen before in literature in Spanish, that boy’s talent was larger than him. I say “boy” because he’s a little younger than I am, but only a little. We’re almost the same age, old men by now.

Margarita de la Vega: Gabo needed the encyclopedia and so they bought the encyclopedia. At that time one bought the encyclopedia and collections of classic books. They were sold throughout Latin America, in my day Aguilar sold them. There were people who came and offered you the books for a monthly payment, so you bought the entire collection. That was in ’65 or ’66. Gabo said that he was using them, and Mercedes said to him: “You don’t need this volume anymore,” because the man was coming to pick it up for lack of payment. Then Mercedes would give him the ones he had already used. Because Mercedes was always the more practical one. That’s why in his first interviews, especially the one in Playboy, which is very good, he said that men are the dreamers, the poets, and that women are the practical ones; without them the universe would not exist. What he said infuriated me and I even asked him about it once. Of course, he didn’t answer me. He answered only what he felt like answering. But I think that Mercedes is the model for Úrsula, the wife of the first founder of Macondo, Úrsula, the wife of the founder, she invents the business of the little sugar animals; she’s the one who makes the family survive.

Emmanuel Carballo: I’m a pretty old man now, my dear girl. I don’t remember a lot of things, but I’m going to tell you what I do remember. So, we had lunch, we had supper, we talked, we got drunk for months. When he began to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, he told ERA: “I’ve given you all my books because, well, you’re my friends. This is the most interesting publisher in Mexico, but too young; the book I’m writing now, and I have a lot of hopes for it, I plan to give it to an important Spanish-language publisher.” And then it was between Spain and Buenos Aires. He forgot about Ediciones ERA, telling us it was very small for the hopes he had for the novel.

Guillermo Angulo: Then Ms. Gabo, when they finally got the money to mail the manuscript (money they didn’t have, since their car was in hock and they owed money to the butcher and to everybody), what she says is: “Now all we need is for that novel to be a piece of shit.”

Emmanuel Carballo: He was totally certain he had written a very important work.

Rafael Ulloa: Then he sent it to be published by Editorial Sudamericana, in Argentina. And he spent everything he had to mail the fucking book. Then he said to his wife: “Now all we need is for that fucking book not to be worth a damn.” And just think what the situation was like . . .

Emmanuel Carballo: There were three of us in my house who were close to him. At Comercio and Administración, No. 4, next to University City, and we’d see one another there on Saturdays at about five and work until seven. Then we’d talk, drink, gossip, do what young friends do. He spoke about his mother, his friends, his brothers and sisters, his life as a journalist in Bogotá, in Barranquilla . . . He talked about all that very enthusiastically. Our friendship was a literary one. He respected me. I respected him. I was enthusiastic about his novel and he was enthusiastic about my having spent time reading it. I would read the chapter two or three times (it took me a week) in order to talk about it to him the following week. The work ended and our friendship ended. The year we were working was a very beautiful year. We’d wait for Saturday to come in order to talk to this man.

MarÍa Luisa ElÍo: I recall that Aureliano Buendía’s first death hurts him so much that he revives him. He gives the story another direction so that he doesn’t die.

Rodrigo Moya: He lived in the Colonia Florida. He was married and had the two boys. Sometimes I’d go to his house with Angulo. I remember one or two visits we made to Gabo’s house because Angulo visited him a great deal and Gabo was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. We’d arrive early, at about seven, and everything was dark, and Mercedes tells us: “Gabo’s working but he’ll be down soon.” We waited an hour and Gabo didn’t come down, so then we started to smoke marijuana and in a while Gabo comes down and joins us. And we were talking and I never can remember what we said. Imagine, it’s fifty years ago. But we were very happy next to the fireplace, where there was a fire burning, and he talked to us about One Hundred Years of Solitude, and what I do remember is that he was swollen. Then Mercedes told us that when he was writing a very intense part or moment, he would swell up. His face swelled up. The process of a work like that is a little superhuman, and so those things happen.